Wednesday 30 April 2008

New Project

I'm currently working on a big project, which has the potential to grow into a very profitable free service if given enought time. I'm working in conjunction with affiliatejunction to offer...... well, I won't spoil the surprise by telling you now! You'll have to wait and see. :) Hopefully the "beta" will be ready by next week, so keep posted for updates soon.

Sunday 27 April 2008

AppEngine Apps

I've made my first AppEngine apps now. I plan to do a few more, but for now, here are the URLs:

pi.appspot.com
http-get.appspot.com

Tuesday 8 April 2008

I've got a Google AppEngine Account!

Yes, I've finally got it. After waiting 40 minutes, I got my first Google AppEngine Account. But unfortunately I don't have any time to test it here and now. All I had time to do first up was find their first broken link: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/tools/configuringanapp.html. Try it - they seem to have made at least one mistake!

What languages are supported by Google App Engine?

What languages are supported by Google App Engine?

Currently, Google App Engine allows you to write your applications with Python 2.5. For security reasons, some Python modules written in C are disabled in our system. Also, since Google App Engine doesn't support writing to disk, some libraries that support this and other functionalities are only partially enabled. Our developer documentation gives a good overview of the Python runtime environment. A description and full reference of Python libraries that are disabled or partially disabled can be found here.

Additionally, your website templates can include Javascript along with your HTML. Among other things, this allows you to write webservices that make use of Ajax web development techniques.

From the Google FAQ

Google AppEngine

What is Google AppEngine?
How to get a Google AppEngine Account
Google AppEngine Accounts giveaways
Free Google AppEngine Account

Account details: username and password for a Google AppEngine Account

Date and Time of Google AppEngine release account register

Do these words make you excited? They do for me. Here's why.

Google just launched a new service, Google AppEngine. Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users.
Here is the official announcement:

Today we’re announcing a preview release of Google App Engine, an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure. The goal is to make it easier for web developers to build and scale applications, instead of focusing on system administration and maintenance.

Leveraging Google App Engine, developers can:

  • Write code once and deploy. Provisioning and configuring multiple machines for web serving and data storage can be expensive and time consuming. Google App Engine makes it easier to deploy web applications by dynamically providing computing resources as they are needed. Developers write the code, and Google App Engine takes care of the rest.
  • Absorb spikes in traffic. When a web app surges in popularity, the sudden increase in traffic can be overwhelming for applications of all sizes, from startups to large companies that find themselves rearchitecting their databases and entire systems several times a year. With automatic replication and load balancing, Google App Engine makes it easier to scale from one user to one million by taking advantage of Bigtable and other components of Google’s scalable infrastructure.
  • Easily integrate with other Google services. It’s unnecessary and inefficient for developers to write components like authentication and e-mail from scratch for each new application. Developers using Google App Engine can make use of built-in components and Google’s broader library of APIs that provide plug-and-play functionality for simple but important features.
I'm still waiting - it's apparently not release time in America yet, so I've been put on the waiting list. I can't believe that 10K accounts have gone in such a short time, so I'll still hope that it's not release time yet!